The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
Computers are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and are becoming pervasively integrated into the environment. For many users, this introduces the issue of configuring, maintaining and managing operating systems, applications and data on a number of computers.
A thin client device or zero client device is a client computer that operates in a client-server architecture. Thin clients are arranged to perform as little processing as possible, and the majority of the processing is performed by a server to which the thin client device is connected. This is in contrast to regular desktop or laptop computers (which can be considered “thick” clients), as the majority of the processing is performed on a local processor.
As the user's data, applications and operating systems are installed centrally on the server in a thin client architecture, the issue of configuring, maintaining and managing the computers becomes more manageable for the user. A single server can be arranged to support a large number of thin client devices. Furthermore, the lower amount of processing power used by a thin client device enables it to be made smaller and more power efficient than an equivalent “thick” client.
Thin/Zero clients come with default values for user configurable settings. A user can make changes to these settings and save them on the thin client. A user may want to revert to the previous settings the changes because those changes do not work for the current setup or for any other reasons. Therefore, there is a need for a mechanism that can restore the customized configurations in use back to one of the previously saved snapshots of customized configurations.